Your Face Belongs To Us: An Interview With Kashmir Hill

Welcome to Original Jurisdiction, the latest legal publication by me, David Lat. You can learn more about Original Jurisdiction by reading its About page, and you can email me at davidlat@substack.com. This is a reader-supported publication; you can subscribe by clicking on the button below. Thanks!

Looking back over my time at Above the Law, one of the things I’m most proud of is the talent I discovered. My first full-time hire was Elie Mystal, now the justice correspondent on The Nation, frequent television commentator, and author of the bestselling Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. My second full-time hire was Kashmir Hill, now at the New York Times, who has a book of her own: Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, published last month by Penguin Random House.

Your Face Belongs to Us is about the future of facial-recognition technology, an incredibly powerful tool with great promise and peril. The book is a story about privacy and technology, but it’s also a story about the law and legal issues. The future of facial recognition will be shaped profoundly by legal responses. Can we craft laws that allow society to take advantage of the benefits of this technology while at the same time preserving the privacy that it threatens?

In my podcast interview with Kashmir, I pushed back on some of the more dystopian elements of Your Face Belongs to Us. I pressed her on whether she might be underestimating the positive aspects of facial-recognition technology, such as its use by law enforcement (such as tracking down January 6 rioters for arrest and prosecution). We analyzed the crucial role played by lawyers in the story of Clearview AI, the mysterious startup at the heart of the book; they include Paul Clement, Floyd Abrams, Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, and attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). And we explored stories of facial-recognition technology gone wrong, including innocent people arrested for crimes they didn’t commit because of false positives on Clearview and similar software.

Thanks to Kashmir for joining me, as well as for her important work exploring the legal and policy aspects of a transformative but troubling technology.

Show Notes:

• Kashmir Hill bio, author website

• Kashmir Hill archives, The New York Times

• Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It, Amazon

Prefer reading to listening? For paid subscribers, a transcript of the entire episode appears below.

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Kashmir Hill (courtesy photo).